Analysis of TCP throughput in IEEE 802.11 based multi-hop ad hoc networks

This paper analyzes the TCP performance in an 802.11 based multi-hop ad hoc network. The analysis is unique because it tries to quantify the throughput of a TCP flow after considering the interaction between TCP's congestion window size and 802.11's MAC (medium access control) contention window size. The analysis results in formulae to compute the throughput of a single TCP flow for an n-hop string topology under the ideal situation where there is no packet loss in the network. The analytical results have been validated by benchmarking against simulation results from ns-2. The outcome of the analysis is useful when ad hoc networks are adopted as an extension to the Internet because TCP is the prevalent transport protocol for reliable data transmissions in the Internet.